Penn Press Log

This Month's Podcast: David R. Swartz and the Evangelical Left

In the November Penn Press podcast, David R. Swartz, Assistant Professor at Asbury University and author of Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism, discusses the overlooked history of progressive evangelical Christians in the United States.

In this section of the interview, Swartz describes the differences between fundamentalist Christians and other evangelical believers:

Evangelicalism--often called neoevangelicalism to distinguish it from nineteenth-century versions of it--came out of fundamentalism. This was a more separatist movement. And this was the era in which Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians are starting to split along fundamentalist and modernist lines. Neoevangelicals came in the wake of that and wanted to reengage the world. They were less separatist, and they were less fired up in some ways.

When you see a conservative Christian, say, railing against gays on a YouTube video, that’s almost always a fundamentalist. The pithiest way to say this is that a fundamentalist is an evangelical who’s angry about something. Now unfortunately in the popular imagination, the word evangelical has come to mean fundamentalist. So there’s a historical part to this, but there’s also a temperamental  aspect to these two movements.

David Swartz, author of Moral Minority by PennPress

The complete interview is available at the Penn Press podcast page.

This Month's Podcast: Albert Churella and the Pennsylvania Railroad

In the September Penn Press podcast, Albert J. Churella, Associate Professor in the Social and International Studies Department at Southern Polytechnic State University and author of The Pennsylvania Railroad, Volume 1: Building an Empire, 1846-1917, talks about his monumental history of the transportation giant.

From the interview:

Americans are addicted to mobility. Today we take for granted our ability to be mobile with our cars, with aircraft. We think less about the role that trains played in increasing American mobility. But not much more than a hundred years ago, America became a mobile society because of the railroads, and particularly because of the Pennsylvania Railroad. And it was the steady diminution of the operating costs associated with railroads—it was the steady downward spiral of railroad rates—that underwrote American economic expansion, the rise of big business, and the prosperity that ultimately made the United States the leading economic power in the history of the world.

In this clip, Churella considers the Pennsylvania Railroad's most significant accomplishments.

The Pennsylvania Railroad Albert J. Churella by PennPress

The complete interview is available at the Penn Press podcast page.

This Month's Podcast: John P. Spencer on Marcus Foster and American Public School Reform

In the August Penn Press podcast, John P. Spencer, Associate Professor of Education at Ursinus College and author of In the Crossfire: Marcus Foster and the Troubled History of American School Reform, talks about the work of a leading public educator who was assassinated in 1973. Spencer shares Foster's success stories and struggles in the Philadelphia and Oakland school systems, and explains what Foster's comprehensive, bridge-building approach can teach us in an age of finger-pointing debates about failing urban schools.

From the interview:

Foster was a pioneer of. . . the current movement to insist on achievement and eradicating achievement gaps, just as in many of these high-performing charter schools that get a lot of attention in the film Waiting for Superman and Geoffrey Canada's project in the Harlem Children's Zone. I see him as a real precursor to that. But on the other hand. . . he took the larger society to task for expecting that we could do this on the cheap and that you could pretend that resources were adequate for these schools.

In this clip, Spencer explains why Foster's legacy is relevant to today's school reform efforts.

In the Crossfire: Marcus Foster and School Reform Interview Excerpt by PennPress

The complete interview is available at the Penn Press podcast page.

This Month's Podcast: Victoria W. Wolcott on Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters

In the July Penn Press podcast, Victoria W. Wolcott, Associate Professor of History at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, tells how African Americans and their allies fought to integrate parks and playlands across the United States--often in the face of violence and intimidation. Wolcott is the author of the forthcoming book, Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America.

"It's not simply kids having fun at a roller skating rink. It's that when you associate certain kinds of spaces with cleanliness, safety, and fun that exclude people of color, then that association has powerful cultural and political effects long after desegregation actually happens," says Wolcott.

In this excerpt, Wolcott talks about Crystal Beach Park, Coney Island, Glen Echo Park, and the creation of Disneyland.

 

Click here to listen to the complete interview.

This Month's Podcast: Ruth Mazo Karras on Medieval Marriages and Unmarriages

In the June Penn Press podcast Ruth Mazo Karras, Professor of History and Director of the Center for Medieval Studies at the University of Minnesota, reminds us that traditional marriage was not the form of coupling in medieval Europe. Her new book Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages examines the various relationships that took shape during that period.

Click here to listen.

This Month's Podcast: Saladin M. Ambar on Governors, Presidents, and Governors as Presidents

In the May Penn Press podcast, Lehigh University political scientist Saladin M. Ambar, author of How Governors Built the Modern American Presidency, discusses the role that governorship played in shaping America's executive branch. Ambar talks about the influence of governors and presidents such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Bob La Follette, and Rutherford Hayes. He also discusses the implications of this leadership legacy for the 2012 presidential election.

Visit the Penn Press podcast page to listen.

This Month's Podcast: A Reading from The Satires of Horace

In the April Penn Press podcast, our own Sara Davis reads selections from The Satires of Horace, translated by A.M. Juster. In the Satires, the Roman philosopher and dramatic critic Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-3 B.C.), known as Horace, provides trenchant social commentary on men's perennial enslavement to money, power, fame, and sex. Juster's striking new translation relies on the tools and spirit of the English light verse tradition while taking care to render the original text as accurately as possible.

Davis reads "Satire 1" and an excerpt from "Satire 10."

Visit the Penn Press podcast page to listen.

This Month's Podcast: Astounding Wonder author John Cheng on Readers, Race, and Rocket Science

In the March Penn Press podcast, historian and patent-holder John Cheng discusses the early culture of popular science fiction. Cheng's new book, Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America, examines the origins of the genre and its community of fans. Cheng shows how pulp science fiction magazines of the 1920s and 30s reflected mainstream views of race and gender while inspiring both professional scientists and amateurs to pursue research.

Cheng talks about science fiction publishing pioneer Hugo Gernsback, Ming the Merciless, and a group of science fiction fans and rocket enthusiasts first known as the American Interplanetary Society. AIS spawned Reaction Motors, makers of the rocket engine that powered the Bell X-1.

Visit the Penn Press podcast page to listen.

This Month's Podcast: Shawn Leigh Alexander on the Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP

In the February podcast Shawn Leigh Alexander, Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and interim director of the Langston Hughes Center at the University of Kansas, talks about the efforts of T. Thomas Fortune and more well-known African American activists between the end of the Reconstruction and the establishment of the NAACP in 1909. An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP is Alexander's latest book.

Click here to listen to the interview.

Paul's Pick of the Month, a Free Article from the Journal Humanity

Every month, Paul Chase in the Penn Press Journals department invites our beloved blog readers to download a complimentary article from one of our many scholarly journals.

Paul's Pick for December comes from the journal Humanity, a semiannual publication dedicated to publishing original research and reflection on human rights, humanitarianism, and development in the modern and contemporary world.

On "Humanitarian" Adoption (Madonna in Malawi) by Kerry Bystrom, appears in the Fall 2012 issue of Humanity. The essay explores media representations of transnational adoption to chart northern perceptions of the practice. "Understandings of adoption as rescue and violent exploitation, of egoistic and altruistic, of gift, theft, and constrained choice, undercut and overlay each other," writes Bystrom.

To download this free article and learn more about Humanity, click here.

Check the Penn Press Log on January 15 for Paul's next pick.